Somebody Got Kicked Off PSN For Sharing Pictures From Watch Dogs 2

It's not often that a player gets banned for sharing images of things they discovered within a game but, according to a recent post on NeoGAF, that's exactly what happened when a guy discovered a rather unconventional character model in Watch Dogs 2 and decided to post some images through the PlayStation Network.

If you head on over to this post from NeoGAF user Goron2000, you'll find their tale of woe involving Watch Dogs 2 and, drumroll please, a vagina. According to the post, Amazon sent them their copy of Watch Dogs 2 early and, like any sane human being, they got to playing it as soon as it arrived.

As the story goes, Goron "accidentally" blew up some civilians with a pipe bomb within the game world and, when they went to survey the damage they had created, they discovered one of the character models was a woman who, with her skirt up, had a fully rendered vagina. Obviously, that's not something you tend to see in video games, so Goron decided to take some in-game photos before sharing them via Live from PlayStation and then posting them online.

The next day Goron was surprised to discover they were no longer able to access the PlayStation Network. Seeing a brief message about their account being banned, they popped onto their email and discovered the standard correspondence from Sony stating that they were being cut off from PSN for a week due to "your online activity in Live from PlayStation." The reason cited was "content of an adult or sexual nature," which is against the code of conduct for the service. Apparently, a bit of time has passed and the ban has been upped to a full month which, obviously, did not sit well with Goron. We assume that the traction the story has been getting online led to Sony backing down, as the most recent update to the situation is that the ban has been lifted.

As for the character model, apparently, Ubisoft is working on a fix. The publisher confirmed to Polygon that a patch will be released that addresses the situation and, even though the game is rated Mature, they want players to be able to share any pictures/videos from Watch Dogs 2 without the risk of breaking any content clauses. The patch is due sometime this week.

This is certainly a unique situation and it seems to be causing some confusion over which party is truly at fault. As Goron argues, all they did was take a picture of something within Watch Dogs 2 and share it, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that no matter what is or is not in the game, Goron decided to share the image through Live from PlayStation, which has its own code of conduct. Absolutely anyone can view the Live from PlayStation feed, including minors. In other words, if Little Tommy's parents are doing their job, he won't be exposed to a game like Watch Dogs 2, which has mature themes and content. However, if Little Tommy jumps onto Live from PlayStation, he now runs the risk of seeing the image that Goron posted. The code of conduct exists specifically to avoid situations like this.

The interesting thing is that, had Goron not been playing Watch Dogs 2 early, this situation may have never occurred, even if he still stumbled across the adult content and posted it. Now that Watch Dogs 2 has been released, there are thousands of people posting pictures and videos from the game on Live from PlayStation. As someone playing it early, though, Goron's picture was swimming in a much smaller pond and, obviously, caught someone's attention.